


the one night that we're keeping off the books

by jessicamiriamdrew



Category: Constantine (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-09 22:23:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17413649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessicamiriamdrew/pseuds/jessicamiriamdrew
Summary: It’s not hard to tell when Zed figures out what she’s looking at, because her eyes go wide and she drops it on the table.“You and John got married?” she asks.His stomach lurches: between Renee and John, the word marriage is a harbinger of further destruction.“Civil partnership, I believe,” John corrects her. “The Brits weren’t quite that progressive then.”or, the one where documents are legally binding, even if you ignore their existence for years





	the one night that we're keeping off the books

**Author's Note:**

> thanks keanu and winona for the inspiration with your maybe legally binding marriage
> 
> this is rated m to be super cautious. post tv show canon
> 
> also if you're doing math about when civil unions in the uk became legal, you can rest easy knowing that i intentionally fudged the dates. 
> 
> a few nods to hellblazer comics canon if you squint

Chas has a post office box for his mail. The mill house can’t be found by the post office anymore, and while postal workers are among the bravest people he’s met, he understands why they were wary of dropping off mail. Seeing magic rituals involving dragons will do that.

Besides, it’s good for them to have some kind of legitimate address. John can order from catalogs, Zed has gotten really into bullet journaling to channel her psychic energy, and Chas gets mail from Geraldine.

The only piece of mail today is from England. It says Francis Chandler, not John Constantine, so alarm bells are already ringing. Chas didn’t live in England long enough to have left much of a paper trail, and anything that’s followed him here can’t be good news.

-

He lets the letter sit for the weekend, the possible contents morphing in his mind. It isn’t magical—the wards of the house would’ve alerted him to that—and it’s a slim document. There’s probably nothing in it that can cause any harm.

Still, Chas waits until he’s nursing his third beer to open it. 

Certificate of Civil Partnership  
Date and place of civil partnership recognition: Eighteenth July 2000  
Name and surname: John Constantine | Francis Chandler

Chas sucks in a gulp of air. This document shouldn’t exist because what they did wasn’t real. They were drunk; they’d lost a bet. It was a big old joke to their group of friends.

And Chas just...tried to forget about kissing John and signing his name. Like all the other times he’s kissed John and slept with him and then tried to forget about it, because that’s the easiest way to go about life.

He met and married Renee, and nothing spit out any red flags when they did their paperwork, but… He doesn’t know how linked other countries systems are to the American ones.

Goddamnit, John.

He has no idea who ordered the certificate to be sent. They try to be careful, the three of them, about staying off grid, but Chas has to have a physical mailing address so he can see Geraldine.

And someone used that to send him a piece of paper declaring that he and John have been in a civil union for nineteen years.

A legally binding one, since the paperwork seems legitimate. There are stamps and seals and he remembers that night. Chas remembers that morning—waking up to John in his bed, and Chas’ fleeting thoughts that maybe they could make it real.

Nothing with John has ever been as real as Chas wants it to be.

—

It’s cowardly to bring it up when Zed is around but she’ll keep him calmer. Both of them, really, because John’s reaction is up for grabs too.

“I got some interesting mail the other day,” Chas says. 

John is scraping his fork on his plate. Zed is looking at him though—she can probably feel his tenseness.

“What do you remember about July 2000?”

John’s head snaps up. “We were on tour, weren’t we? Playing some smaller clubs every night?”

Mucuous Membrane was on tour and Chas had become a roadie to keep close to the band. When he’s being honest with himself, it’s because he didn’t want to stay away from John. He should’ve flown back to the US and tried to get on a roadie circuit there.

He’s got the envelope in his hands, worried he’ll destroy the document without it. Chas tosses it to the middle of the table. He should tell John to grab it but Zed is faster.

It’s not hard to tell when Zed figures out what she’s looking at, because her eyes go wide and she drops it on the table.

“You and John got married?” she asks.

His stomach lurches: between Renee and John, the word marriage is a harbinger of further destruction.

“Civil partnership, I believe,” John corrects her. “The Brits weren’t quite that progressive then.” John’s not as blase as he’s pretending—his knuckles are white around his fork.

“Is this real?” Zed’s looking between them like she can’t decide which scenario is more likely: that he and John did get married, or that someone would fake it.

John snatches the document from in front of Zed and if Chas lets his eyes go soft, he can see John as he looked twenty years ago. Too skinny, brittle, and so desperate for recognition it poured off him in waves of self deprecation.

“Zed, love, could we have the room?” 

Chas nods at her when she looks over to him. He and John should have this conversation alone. Zed smiles at him, a little uncertain, yet retreats.

“Do you even remember?” Chas asks, after Zed’s footfall goes quiet. There was a lot of alcohol then, and drugs, and whatever magic John was getting up to at the tender age of nineteen.

Nineteen years. Chas spent them trying to forget, and with Renee he managed for awhile. It was another stupid, drunken night that he and John didn’t need to discuss as their lives shifted and ruptured over magic.

There were at least two other drunken nights with longer reaching consequences. Both of those nights were instrumental in helping Chas tank his marriage to Renee.

“Remember the only time I got married? Of course I do, Chas.”

All these years, and it still only requires a few words from John to suckerpunch him.

“It wasn’t meant to be legally binding.”

And a piece of paperwork doesn’t make them married in any way that counts. 

Even though they’d qualify for a domestic partnership tomorrow if they want down to Atlanta. All they’d need to do is declare a relationship.

“Well I thought so too, mate. I guess someone filed the paperwork.”

John had said it was fine. John had said it was all taken care of. And Chas, like always, had believed him.

His hands twitch, the malaise in his gut turning into physical energy. How much of his life would’ve been different?

“Chas—” John starts, but Chas isn’t listening anymore.

This could ruin his custody arrangements. Renee could make his life hell. Whoever sent him the document knows it exists and it could be on its way to Renee. 

“Find out who sent it,” Chas says. “And until then, leave me the hell alone.”

—

John has been avoiding him, which is what Chas asked. They did get called away on a trip, but that’s work. When the night was done, he and Zed shared a motel room. Chas suspects John slept in the cab instead of springing for another room. Typical self flagellation.

There are more rooms in the mill house than Chas could count, even if the number didn’t shift, and he’s still tripping over John’s clothes, and his dishes, and the spell ingredients left out. It’s been nothing except casual pleasantries to keep Zed off their backs and the gulf of Chas wondering if this push is too far for John.

Sometimes he closes his eyes and he could be in Brooklyn with the pit in his stomach so reminiscent of things going south with Renee. Their big bang up fights, the miles of space they gave each other so as not to clue in Geraldine, and the part of him that wanted to concede.

The civil partnership certificate is where he left it on the kitchen table. He imagines it framed, the two of them married and unmarred by magic. In a universe where everything went right...he can’t imagine that as clearly as he wants. Chas can’t see John without the cigarettes and the barbs that are more habit of reflex than meant.

He struggles to picture John as anything different than the other side of his own mirror. Chas doesn’t know where his story ends if it isn’t twisted up with John.

—

Chas is ready to say something sharp when John sits down next to him on the couch. That’s until he sees that John’s holding something.

There, on crumpled printer paper, is a receipt for an online order of a copy of a civil partnership certificate. John’s name is affixed in the digital signature section.

“You sent it?” But John’s shock over the certificate had been genuine. Chas can tell when he’s faking for the audience and that wasn’t an illusion.

“It was supposed to be addressed to me, not you.” John lets out a long drag of smoke. 

All these years of watching John smoke, and Chas is reliably entranced even now. 

“Someone was trying to blackmail me. They had a dossier of my supposed bullshit. This was the only thing that had teeth.”

Chas can’t make the connection from their drunken union to someone using it against John. If someone needed a list, Chas could list one hundred things easier and grimier to pin on John. That’s only in his off the cuff, initial burst of thinking.

“Chas, the shit they were going to ask me to do…” John gestures vaguely with the hand holding his lit cigarette. “I really didn’t think the union was legal until I got tipped off by a colleague who stole it for me.”

Renee’s voice echoes in his head, reminding him that John is a liar, and of the scores of other horrible things he’s done. There can’t be a benefit to John for lying about the legality of a night from nineteen years ago.

John holds Chas’ glance for a moment, and Chas feels like he’s travelled back to other conversations at different tables, same packs of silk cut littering the scene. How many times have they looked at each other like this? Why does Chas always blink?

“There’s two tried and true ways to get to me, Chas. There’s Zed, of course, but people don’t realize we’re that closely associated.”

He stubs out the cigarette in their coffee table ashtray and looks up at Chas, shifting closer. “Then there’s you, mate.”

“I don’t believe that,” Chas says. “There’s Ritchie, and Anne Marie.” John has some other friends, even a bit of family back in England.

John shrugs at him. “I didn’t say it was only you and Zed, just that you’re the most effective.”

“You were supposed to be off limits. I spent years making that clear, keeping magic from you the best I could. Fucked it up myself though, didn’t I?”

The extra souls felt like a curse when it helped in the dissolution of his marriage. These days it feels like a tether to John, something the two of them can’t break. Doing good may be penance for John but Chas’ work is selfish: it gives John a reason to stay close.

He puts a hand on John’s own, surprised by the tremor in John’s fingers. “I didn’t leave, John.” Chas has always been incapable of that. His loyalty is a suicidal guillotine. 

John inhales deeply, letting the exhale go slowly. Chas wants to touch the tension lines around his eyes and make them soft. “I thought you would, when you found out the record existed. I just needed a copy for the spell so I could destroy the record.”

Chas can’t remember the last time he kissed John. He used to keep a list in his head, so thrilled by having John’s attention that he was loathe to forget any of it.

The sudden, quiet oh John makes when Chas kisses him feels like a reversal of themselves. Chas doesn’t stop kissing him and John drags himself in closer, until John’s practically in his lap. 

Chas has spent over nineteen years avoiding the truth of being in love with him. John has a hand on his neck, another in his hair, and Chas could do this all night. He wants to escalate it, take it more places, but he pulls back. 

“Does that count as a divorce?” He reaches and smoothes the wrinkle in John’s forehead, hoping to keep John from bolting.

“It doesn’t have to,” John hedges. “We could keep our copy, destroy the rest. Make sure no one else ever knows about it.”

The romantic in Chas wants to think the civil partnership is what kept them coming back to each other all these years, some kind of cosmic guiding line. 

It’s not the truth, but John’s body against his is genuine enough, and if Chas can have him for nineteen years to come? Everything else in the whole world can be bullshit.

**Author's Note:**

> this was supposed to be funny but you know...it's constantine
> 
> the title is from mistakes we should have made by dawes
> 
> i messed around for the dates of civil unions because i also wanted to fit in renee and chas being married, and based on geraldine's age the dates of legal civil unions needed to move backwards.
> 
> 2019 is the year of me writing shit and posting immediately! i really don't know what i'm doing anymore.
> 
> please hit me up on tumblr if you'd like.


End file.
